Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. He also serves as the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. From 2001-2022 he was co-editor of the journal Social Text, and since 2021 he has been the editor of PMLA.
Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill; and scholarly editions of classic works by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. Most recently Edwards co-edited Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a volume of the collected interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, which he is translating into English.
His other translations include the English-language version of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 book Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) as well as poetry, fiction, and essays by Jacques Derrida, Monchoachi, Sony Labou Tansi, and Edouard Glissant. Edwards is also a collagist and poet; in 2022 his work was featured in an online exhibition by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (https://riversinstitute.org/publications).
Edwards’s books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003); Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2017); Easily Slip into Another World (Knopf, 2023), the co-written autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill; and scholarly editions of classic works by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. Most recently Edwards co-edited Écrire le monde noir (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2024), a volume of the collected interwar writings of the pioneering Martinican intellectual Paulette Nardal, which he is translating into English.
His other translations include the English-language version of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 book Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) as well as poetry, fiction, and essays by Jacques Derrida, Monchoachi, Sony Labou Tansi, and Edouard Glissant. Edwards is also a collagist and poet; in 2022 his work was featured in an online exhibition by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (https://riversinstitute.org/publications).